[BusinessTeam] Peer-to-Peer networking

Message-ID: <6B75EF096AE0BE428B8CEDEA89C5F63278228B@exchange01.lab49.com> · Tue Sep 19 16:08:47 2000 UTC

note the mention of Tacit Knowledge Systems at the end of the article

Pushing P2P at business

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By  <mailto:bob_trott@infoworld.com> Bob Trott 

WHILE NAPSTER, Gnutella, and the thorny issue of intellectual property
rights have thrust p-to-p (peer-to-peer) computing into the spotlight, the
IT enterprise is now looking to tame the computing model for its own
purposes.

In two weeks, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and others will host the first
meeting of the Peer-to-Peer Working Group in hopes of ironing out p-to-p
standards so that the technology can be used in a business-to-business
setting without privacy or security fears.

Companies are eyeing p-to-p technology as a way to offer an efficient and
inexpensive way to do business, particularly of the business-to-consumer
and business-to-business variety, according to officials involved in the
standards push.

"There are some tasks that absolutely have to be done by big servers in
the center of the wheel, but there are other things like virus protection
that can be run utilizing the idle computing cycles that exist in a large
network," said Howard High, communications manager at Santa, Clara,
Calif.-based Intel.

Indeed, High said, the savings in the p-to-p model can be dramatic. Intel
engineers have used internal p-to-p technology Netbatch in chip design and
have saved Intel $500 million over a decade, High said.

Of course, the chip giant has a distinct interest in promoting p-to-p,
which ideally could leverage computer downtime when more computing
capacity is available.

"P-to-p information-sharing technology will radically change business
models and enterprise technology management approaches since it addresses
an exponentially growing demand for more and faster information,"
Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner analyst John Pescatore said in a recent
report.

One company hoping to take advantage of p-to-p's resurgence is Provo,
Utah-based NextPage, which next week will ship NXT 3.0, the latest version
of its software that allows file servers to communicate throughout an
enterprise. The software is aimed at businesses that need immediate access
to information that is spread across the world. 

"We are focused very much on be able to create access on a b-to-b
framework," said Darren Lee, NextPage's strategy and product marketing
vice president. "We're doing distributed access to corporate information
content, from email to documents to slides. All of these things can be
distributed through our [NXT 3.0] platform."

Tacit Knowledge Systems is also looking to take its p-to-p solution to the
b-to-b stage. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's KnowledgeMail scours
outbound e-mail and "deconstructs" the language in the email, finding data
and terms to generate the profile. The idea is to let enterprise IT shops
build profiles, which are published on corporate intranets only and at the
direction of the employee for which the profile was generated, to hook up
employees with common skillsets to work on corporate teams, said David
Gilmour, president and CEO of Tacit.

Gilmour predicted that such p-to-p knowledge-sharing solutions will become
more popular as b-to-b relationships become centered on the internal
expertise of each company.

"Wouldn't it be nice to expose just enough of your own knowledge to your
partners and have matches that allow you to talk to people on the same
subjects that are of interest to you?" Gilmour asked.

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Luke Flemmer
VP Wireless Business Development
nano
phone: (212) 430-6841
fax:      (212) 430-6374
www.nano.com <http://www.nano.com/> 